From the “phallic climate model” department, h/t James Delingpole / Breitbart – a pair of hoaxers have demonstrated that random garbage, some of it computer generated, can pass academic peer review – providing it seems to conform to left wing social prejudices about masculinity, capitalism and climate change.

THE CONCEPTUAL PENIS AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT: A SOKAL-STYLE HOAX ON GENDER STUDIES

…

The Hoax

The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.

That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.

“Abstract: Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.”

“Climate change and the conceptual penis – Now here are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the conceptual penis. Our planet is rapidly approaching the much-warned-about 2°C climate change threshold, and due to patriarchal power dynamics that maintain present capitalist structures, especially with regard to the fossil fuel industry, the connection between hypermasculine dominance of scientific, political, and economic discourses and the irreparable damage to our ecosystem is made clear.”

This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper waspublished in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (In case the PDF is removed, we’ve archived it.)

Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

Manspreading — a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide — is akin to raping the empty space around him.

This already damning characterization of our hoax understates our paper’s lack of fitness for academic publication by orders of magnitude. We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

The hoax paper contains a reference to climate change in the abstract, and a section on climate change;

…

Abstract: Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.

…

2.2. Climate change and the conceptual penis

Nowhere are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the conceptual penis. Our planet is rapidly approaching the much-warned-about 2°C climate change threshold, and due to patriarchal power dynamics that maintain present capitalist structures, especially with regard to the fossil fuel industry, the connection between hypermasculine dominance of scientific, political, and economic discourses and the irreparable damage to our ecosystem is made clear.

Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy and action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a male-dominated mindset. This mindset is best captured by recognizing the role of the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology. When it is applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be cheaply despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and diminished when our patriarchal approaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent in the conceptual penis becomes clear. At best, climate change is genuinely an example of hyper-patriarchal society metaphorically manspreading into the global ecosystem.

The deep reason for this problematic trend is explained, in its essence, by McElwaine (1999), where he writes, “Pickett suggests that we have to choose between capitalist rationalism and cultural sub-capitalist theory” (Pickett, 1993). Contemporary capitalist theory, a.k.a. neocapitalist theory, derives its claim on rationalism directly from the hypermasculine focus in science and society that can best be accounted for by identification with the conceptual penis. Paxton and Scameron (2006) seem to agree, noting that, “neocapitalist materialist theory holds that reality comes from the collective unconscious, but only if the premise of dialectic objectivism is invalid; if that is not the case, sexuality has significance.” Toxic hypermasculinity derives its significance directly from the conceptual penis and applies itself to supporting neocapitalist materialism, which is a fundamental driver of climate change, especially in the rampant use of carbon-emitting fossil fuel technologies and careless domination of virgin natural environments. We need not delve deeply into criticisms of dialectic objectivism, or their relationships with masculine tropes like the conceptual penis to make effective criticism of (exclusionary) dialectic objectivism. All perspectives matter.

One practical recommendation that follows from this analysis is that climate change research would be better served by a change in how we engage in the discourses of politics and science, avoiding the hypermasculine penis-centric take whenever possible (Kaijser & Kronsell, 2013).

The Postmodern-generator, the random nonsense computer used to generate much of the content of the hoax paper, is available here.

I have got to admit, I’m so used to wading through peer reviewed climate garbage, I would likely have accepted this study at face value. The hoax paper simply doesn’t stand out that much from other nonsensical peer reviewed rubbish written by climate and social studies academics – which of course is why it was accepted by the journal.

Here’s the money quote: “Most of the progress in knowledge and technology comes from the (A1) category [sciences concerned with homogeneous entities and deterministic (at least in the aggregate) relationships e.g. materials science]. Although researchers in the other categories would like you to think they are making comparable contributions to society, they are not.”

But creationism, Hugs? Without creationism, there wouldn’t be science (in the classic sense, there might be plenty of imagination based speculation) it seems to me.

The concept of a Created world/universe is what encouraged the Christian intellectuals who initiated science (as we once knew it ; ) to study the things and forces in the world around them (many of them said as much). They expected there to be great order and consistency, because it was all (thought to be) Created by a hyper intelligent and consistent God (for our benefit no less).

Played out rather well, I feel, till the Evolution quasi-religion took off for real, and the image worshipers started taking over . . I realize many here are members of the Church of bit by bit, but seriously, just because you believe some unobserved events occurred, it ain’t harmless to elevate such images to scientific orthodoxy status . . and now we pay . . I fear

The correct way to make this determination is to compare the advent and achievements of Science in the Christian nations compared to the advent and achievements of non-Christian nations. I believe most Science is found in the Christian nations. It appears that the almighty zero came from India, crucial to the development of mathematics.

“Excerpts from the letter to Madame Christina help to reveal Galileo’s view of Scripture and that of his predecessors. He writes, “I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the Holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood.”[10]

He cited Copernicus in the same vein: “He [Copernicus] did not ignore the Bible, but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved, then it could not contradict the Scripture when they were rightly understood”.[11] He quotes Augustine relating true reason to Scriptural truth.

“And in St. Augustine [in the seventh letter to Marcellinus] we read: ‘If anyone shall set the authority of Holy Writ against clear and manifest reason, he who does this knows not what he has undertaken; for he opposes to the truth not the meaning of the Bible, which is beyond his comprehension, but rather his own interpretation; not what is in the Bible, but what he has found in himself and imagines to be there’”[12]”

IMV this is major news, or should be. Schools now days, elementary through Ivy League academics, are innundated, marginalised and poisoned with this crap, often supported by tax dollars. Much praise to the authors exposing this insanity.

For a precious few science remains the proces and rules that guide discovery of our natural world. Those few are the ones that drive progress and enrich society. For the remainder “science” is just interior decorating for the mind where form is far more important than function.

VUW has a lecturer in feminist geography. I am sure that it will have a lecturer in feminist mathematics before long.

So, does a feminist geographer lecture about all thongs (er, things) between latitudes 36 North … the Equator … and 36 South? /sarcashm (The discussion of all things demanded by illogical liberals and paid for by the government)

Hugs, what you describe is nothing more than a very local “little ice age”.
“Feminist glaciology” (I think Gloria Steinem has a PhD in the field.) refers to those who believe that any natural husband-wife sexual relationships is r@pe unless the husband is such a thing a “male lesbian”.

(A Rutgers women’s studies professor (I think), several years before “transgender” was a word, made the claim that ALL intercourse was rape …except between her and her husband because he was a male-lesbian.)

Don’t leave a paper like this around too long among purveyors of meaningless (but dangerous anti [white] male hate literature) drivel from long terminally corrupted social science ‘organs’. You know we’ve already been banished from ‘diversity’. It could become a manifesto for a neomarxbrothers (sisters?) underground dinkelectomy movement or something.

Definitely the new left will sop this stuff up. Moreover, revealing it as a hoax won’t cause embarrassment because these types will simply write some antedated ‘historical’ stuff on the subject and reprise this paper. Revise history? We see it all the time in climate science. Isn’t there a pool on what the 1950s temperatures will be 2100?

Actually, clever use of this type of hoax may be an effective way to deflect and occupy these postabnormal mindless ‘scholars’ into even more useless, harmless pursuits.

This is just too weird. It needs to be picked up by media so that people come to understand the biased lies that have infected the science community.
I also believe that it’s possible that Trump is currently running a canary trap on the media to find the leakers in the WH. He is fond of this method and has used it in the past.

awesome troll job, tho
it opens up a world of innovative research.
this is why private industry should never fund basic science- the positive externalities can only be realized by pigovian methods. vagina dentata as a regulatory construct has existed in all democracies.
oops… i’m falling under the spell!

Joke:
A cloistered virgin mama’s boy becomes a dentist.
On his first date, his date realizes the young dentist is anxious, even fearful.
She asks what is he afraid of.
The dentist says:
“My mother says that you have teeth down there.”
She smiles coyly and exposes herself.
“Now does this look like I have teeth down there?”

I’ve been saying this for years. A ‘hoax’ can be something relatively harmless and innocuous like Bigfoot or alien butt-probing. This climate change alarmist hysteria and absurd, world government-directed plans for “fixing” the planet is… something else.

In this paper the toxicity of male gender isomorphode netranton is analysed with reference to the norms of the post-modern melange of independent cultural assignment and its associated rugosity with the repressive isolation and distortions of capitalist hegemony. Our pre-analytic reference to modes of behaviour was established by use of Bayesian regression in multi-mordotic states of infant pre-conditioning associated with the use of passive aggressive synment of emotional frameworks. Our study demonstrates a clear causative correlation with weaponized thought and leads to a post gender realignment of cultural states in a morbonic flutelage of habistic rotology.

Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) said it much better in the poem “Jabberwocky”;
Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves
Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:
All mimsy were ye borogoves;
And ye mome raths outgrabe.

An excellent example of such poetry is offered by Douglas Adams in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, attributed to Vogons:

Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me,
As plurdled gabbleblotchits,
On a lurgid bee,
That mordiously hath blurted out,
Its earted jurtles,
Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer. [drowned out by moaning and screaming]
Now the jurpling slayjid agrocrustles,
Are slurping hagrilly up the axlegrurts,
And living glupules frart and slipulate,
Like jowling meated liverslime,
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,
And hooptiously drangle me,
With crinkly bindlewurdles,mashurbitries.
Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don’t!

Sounds on a par with the gravity of complaints SJWs make when they barricade themselves in offices and makes their demands. Of course, gravity itself is an oppressive patriarchal social construct (Sokel 1996), so please disregard everything I just said.

Quite right. It is not apparent from reading that it is a hoax (just because it seems to mean nothing).

Its power comes from “dog whistles” or triggers in the minds of readers who then inject their own meanings into it as if it actually meant those things. I suspect there’s a density threshold of dog whistles or virtue signals in order to “mask” that any meaning it contains the reader is herself inserting.

Fringe (fake) scientists tend to work the same way; using Big Words ™ to hide that they don’t really say much. Barry Bickmore has been rebutting a strange belief in an ice-core world; a thing I have never heard of prior to his mention. It isn’t even clear why it is important. What distinguishes such things from hoax is that these practitioners seem to believe themselves and can be highly resistant to evidence that would change those beliefs. In a sense it has become their religion.

I have an interest in Barry Bickmore’s argumentation since having sufficient knowledge and skill to know false science is not easy or obvious. I believe one must have a rather broad base of many sciences to be able to spot errors (whether hoax or just plain wrong).

There’s a rash of perpetual motion machines on YouTube involving the repulsive force of magnets. Anyone with even a bit of science ought to know that no such thing is possible; it’s like dividing by zero. I suppose it is fun to try experimentally now and then just to be reminded and to exercise the scientific method: Experiment, report!

“The term physics envy is a phrase used to criticize modern writing and research of academics working in areas such as “softer sciences”, liberal arts, business studies and humanities. The term argues that writing and working practices in these disciplines have overused confusing jargon and complicated mathematics, in order to seem more ‘rigorous’ and like mathematics-based subjects like physics.”

“Its power comes from “dog whistles” or triggers in the minds of readers who then inject their own meanings into it as if it actually meant those things.”
————-
Oh, perhaps this is why modern art can only be truly appreciated by social science students.

Dividing by zero isn’t all that outlandish. Division is essentially subtraction- 250/50 =5 -the number of times you can subtract one from the other. 250/0 = 0. Zero can’t be subtracted from any number because there isn’t any zero in a non-0 number.

philohippous writes: “Division is essentially subtraction- 250/50 =5 -the number of times you can subtract one from the other. 250/0 = 0”

Nice try. The problem ends when you have consumed the minuend (250) through repeated subtractions by the subtrahend (0). Since the 250 is never reduced, the problem never ends, thus the correct answer is that there isn’t one. It’s not infinity; there simply isn’t an answer. 1/infinity is not zero and the reciprocal of zero is not infinity. There isn’t a reciprocal for zero.

Furthermore, multiplication is the opposite operation. What number, times zero, gives you back what you started with? Zero times anything is zero. Thus, 10/0 cannot be 0, because 0*0 is not 10.

“2.2. Climate change and the conceptual penis Nowhere are the consequences of hypermasculine
machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the con-ceptual penis. Our planet is rapidly approaching the much-warned-about 2°C climate change thresh-old, and due to patriarchal power dynamics that maintain present capitalist structures, especially with regard to the fossil fuel industry, the connection between hypermasculine dominance of scientific, political, and economic discourses and the irreparable damage to our ecosystem is made clear.

Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy and
action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a male-dominated mindset. This mindset
is best captured by recognizing the role of the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology.
When it is applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be cheaply
despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and diminished when our patriarchal ap-
proaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture
inherent in the conceptual penis becomes clear. At best, climate change is genuinely an example of
hyper-patriarchal society metaphorically manspreading into the global ecosystem.”

How did this ever come up? Was he an old friend? “Hey buddy, will you cut them off?” Did the person put an ad in the paper? “Wanted: cheap castration surgery?”
Just seems someone would have thought this was a really, really bad idea at some point.
People are crazy.

In March 2001 Meiwes advertised on the internet for a “young well-built man, who wanted to be eaten”. Brandes replied.

On the evening of March 9, the two men went up to the bedroom in Meiwes’ rambling timbered farmhouse. Mr Brandes swallowed 20 sleeping tablets and half a bottle of schnapps before Meiwes cut off Brandes’ penis, with his agreement, and fried it for both of them to eat.

I’ve been having a private laugh, imagining the predicament of the poor peer reviewer(s) desperately trying to understand the paper and finally giving up. admitting to themselves that they’ve come up against authors who have taken post-modern deconstructionist analysis to new heights (sorry, depths).

I’ve been having a private laugh, imagining the predicament of the poor peer reviewer(s) desperately trying to understand the paper and finally giving up. admitting to themselves that they’ve come up against authors who have taken post-modern deconstructionist analysis to new heights (sorry, depths).

If you are right then the reviewers should each have suggested the paper be rejected for publication in its present form because its language is so obscure that its meaning is not clear.

The reviewers’ failures to suggest the paper be rejected for publication demonstrates there was no real peer review of the paper.

Please remember that the ONLY purpose of peer review is to avoid a journal’s Editor suffering the embarrassment of having published a blatantly flawed paper.

Perhaps there are no real peer reviewers for this publication. Perhaps it is an automated system that scans for certain “bad” words or phrases, much like this site, and anything that does not contain those bad things gets passed through. Probably a lot cheaper than having actual paid people read and comment.

This sort of phenomenon is similar to what Buekens and Boudry (2015) referred to as obscurantism (p. 1): “[when] the speaker… [sets] up a game of verbal smoke and mirrors to suggest depth and insight where none exists.”

This is how climate alarmism spreads. People hear the bs and imagine that they understand it. The stupider they are the more likely they are to fall for it. Their illusion that they understand it makes them think they are actually smart.

What then do we make of string theory. The safest position is no position and admit that one doesn’t understand it.

The sad thing about PPBS is that the authors actually think they are being profound. That’s really stupid.

Karl Popper … deprecated the dialectic in The Open Society and Its Enemies, his master work.

Indeed. He quotes Schopenhauer about Hegel.

Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.

Popper holds that the rise of totalitarianism is due to this kind of PPBS. It leads people to think they understand things which they do not understand. They get things profoundly wrong and the world is much worse off.

Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false. Bertrand Russell

popper was just an envious little also-ran. popper’s mysticism was a just dull rip off of plato’s noumenal essence junk, hackneyed and risible, so it couldn’t attract adhesions – er adherents.
hegel outperformed him as mystic and guru – that’s his complaint, really.

gnomish
Popper is the least of your problems.
Time to get it all together and make a serious effort and produce the deep sucking sound that comes with getting your head out of where the sun don’t shine…
Once your eyes get used to the light, an added benefit will be a proper take on the basics of the scientific method.

heh- and i suppose once you’ve wriggled in pleasure over your imagery, you will exercise your wit and define the scientific method?
if you try it, of course, be prepared for a more extensive exposition of you idiocy than you’ve been so kind as to provide so far.
:)
dare ya.

oh, dear, tetris, let’s do this.
first, let’s explore what was the first thing out of your mouth – anal imagery with dolby sensurround.
my first question must be: is it something you’ve elaborated entirely by exercise of your imagination or is there some experiential basis to the scenario you’ve so lovingly constructed?

my second question would not be if you’ve ever heard that scatological metaphor is a logical fallacy- nope- my second question would be- in your vignette about the vigorous extraction – why did you fail to include the obligatory POP?
geddit? popper? pop? oh, for missed opportunities!

“I happen to agree with Popper that Plato, Hegel, and Marx provide the underpinnings for the left wing idiots who prefer theory to reality.”
commiebob- so do i agree- only that popper strove to be first among equals with them.
he was pretty much plato 2.0 with his noumenal excrescence and ‘everything i say is unprovable so sit at my feet and soak up that divine revelation’ guru crap.
deteriorata.
he couldn’t get across that particular pons asinorum whose pass phrase was : anything true can be proven, and like many such failures at their chosen game, adopted the position that it can’t be done. that’s how he earns the company of hegel, kant and hume.
anything true can be proven and that drones mysticism into the dirt.
you want to change the world? theres the wedge to hammer home.

gnomish writes (what he has written elsewhere as well): “anything true can be proven”

I do not agree unless of course you narrowly define “true” to be “that which can be proven” in which case you merely have a useless tautology.

I see you have argued the point elsewhere; it appears to be your personal trademark.
[https]://dhf66.wordpress.com/2016/07/09/10-theorems-for-ideas-about-how-things-work/

Anything ephemeral can be true but not provable. Suppose I declare that I saw lightning last night. The claim is either true or it is false; but it cannot be proven true or false. If you must incorporate the claim into something else, you take the Schroedinger Cat approach of fuzzy logic; it is both true AND false until the uncertainty can be resolved, and that might not ever happen.

You see, the claim is either true or false, but cannot be shown to others which it is. It is an error to presume false when it may be true, and it is an error to presume true when it might be false. The correct approach is to carry forward the uncertainty, either as carrying forward both values or use fuzzy numbers and call it 0.5 true (or biased one way or another for various reasons).

ptolemy2 May 21, 2017 at 2:30 pm says:
“What’s wrong with “if it can’t be disproved it’s not science”. ”
that is correct- but it came with a second part: ‘what is true can not be proven’.
which pair of phrases constitutes 2 logical fallacies – self contradictions – logical self falsifications.
can you identify one of them? i named it earlier.
the second one has to do with the nature of falsification:
in order to falsify a logical proposition you must assert a truth that contradict it.
can you see it now?
let me help:
to FALSIFY, you MUST PROVE TRUE a contradiction.
as popper said that the truth can not be proven, therefore falsification is impossible too.
there’s you pass phrase to get across the bridge. use it or lose it. heh- actually, pay for it or do without.
the price of ownership is freakin REASON. get some.

there may be many explanations for it, but however it comes to pass that a person accepts as true the notion that: “the only thing you can prove is true is that something isn’t true” – and fails to recognize it as the mutant brother of ‘everything i say is a lie’, it defies reason. it’s weaponized stupid and it kills in the crib.

There is no reply for comments below this comment. So I will post here.
Proving something by the scientific method is concerned with regular, orderly cause-and-effect issues; it is not concerned with historical issues.

Scientific testing can demonstrate the reliability of many findings based on knowledge of electricity. Any mass-produced electronic device demonstrates reliable, replicable knowledge regarding cause and effect with electricity. The capacitors and diodes work in a predicable manner with the well-trimmed electrical stream in radio after radio.

Whether lightning flashed last night or not is a matter of history. Proving that truth is an entirely different matter. Proving history has different standards than “replicability.” These are two totally different matters, epistemologically.

“Evolution” is, obviously, a matter of history. We can do the replication-type sciene with parts of it – such as examining genetics of sexual reproduction, genetic errors, etc, but we could never prove “evolution” in the scientific-replicability sense – we would need another planet with its own primordial soup (I know that theory has been debunked, but substitute whatever the theory now prevails until it gets debunked).

The Lenski experiments are pretty close as observable, reasonably repeatable “science” giving support/proof for Evolution. But this Lenski project has required a huge time line, and found the emergence of an apparently favorable trait via mutations in a mere 30,000 generations.

So, that is kind of “proof of concept” for evolution. But, still, the E. coli under investigation are still E. coli – no new species, yet. –So, have we ever observed a new species emerge? Under controlled conditions?

Not quite. Proving evolution would have to be done by historical methods, not by the “science” we learned in middle school, of developing a testable hypothesis, defining a test of it, then carrying out the experiment, and seeing what the observed outcomes say about the a priori hypothesis.

TheLastDemocrat wrote: “Whether lightning flashed last night or not is a matter of history.”

It is my story. His story will be something else. I cannot prove mine; he cannot prove his. It will have happened (or not) in actuality, but because of its ephemeral nature, probably won’t have been recorded as an image, but even if it was, it is only evidence, not proof.

“Proving history has different standards than replicability. These are two totally different matters, epistemologically.”

Agreed. I’m not sure I put much emphasis on this point. I think someone, gnomish probably, was arguing that all true things can be proven. It is clear to me that not all true things can be proven, unless of course you create a tautology by declaring the meaning of “true” to only be that which is proven. IN that case you would need a new word to describe the concept that things exist out in the universe about which I do not know and can neither affirm nor refute, but nevertheless exist and hence are “true” since “false” seems inappropriate for things that exist but are merely not known to exist.

“Evolution is, obviously, a matter of history.”

There is nothing obvious about it and most of evolution is ephemeral; the instant a strand of DNA became unlike its predecessor is as ephemeral as last night’s lightning. If it was “obvious” there would never have been a Scopes monkey trial. Reading this history book is not easy and is a joint effort principally by geologists and paleontologists or whatever.

“We can do the replication-type sciecne with parts of it”

Agreed; and it is so with parts of climate science.

“such as examining genetics of sexual reproduction, genetic errors, etc, but we could never prove “evolution” in the scientific-replicability sense”

Agreed. Even though the principle of evolution is extremely well established there remains occasional debate and discovery about specific procedures and methods (punctuated equilibrium for instance). It remains possible but unlikely we were created yesterday complete with memories and fossils, and absolutely no way to prove we were not. That avenue of thinking is pointless in my opinion so might as well proceed as if everything that seems to be real, IS real, and means what it seems to mean.

“So, that is kind of “proof of concept” for evolution. But, still, the E. coli under investigation are still E. coli – no new species, yet. –So, have we ever observed a new species emerge? Under controlled conditions?”

Maybe. The principle of evolution is pretty easy to demonstrate. Given enough time you can call the result a new species. That isn’t quite proof, nor can there be, how you or I came to be, but its good enough for whatever purpose is served by conducting these experiments, digging in rock and dirt and so on.

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” – Harry Frankfurt

Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but I have to disagree.
Someone who says something that they believe to be true but is not or turns out to not be true (I’ll pick you at 5 but then have a flat tire at 4:45, is still a “liar”. What they said is a lie, through no fault of their own.
What they are not is a “Deciever”. It’s the “decievers” that make liars of us all.

Mods:
TYPOS!
Better would be this:
“Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but I have to disagree.
Someone who says something that they believe to be true but is not, or turns out to not be true (I’ll pick you at 5 but then have a flat tire at 4:45) is still a “liar”. What they said is a lie, through no fault of their own.
What they are not is a “Deciever”. It’s the “Decievers” that make liars of us all.”

Gunga Din says “Someone who says something that they believe to be true but is not, or turns out to not be true (I’ll pick you at 5 but then have a flat tire at 4:45) is still a liar.”

No. There’s a reason that the word “lying” is different than “mistaken”. Both are wrong, lying is intentionally wrong and thus has a moral component. Being mistaken does not have a moral component although it might challenge your knowledge ability.

How can I lie about a genuine intention in the future?
Lies can be about matters of fact.

I discussed truth and history above.

The companion problem is truth and the future. A model of the climate in 2020 cannot be “true.”

About the future, we have predictions, projections, guesstimations, probabilities, forecasts, etc. Some can be far better founded than others. But none is true. [Yet.]

But if the matter is one of cause-and-effect replicability, this is the real heart of science: replicable truth. Given a set of givens, such as my refrigerator not dying and the power not going out, this tray of water will be iced cubes by morning. I plug in the soldering iron, let it warm up a certain time span, and touch the solder to it, and the solder will melt. Time and time again. If I fuse certain electrical components in a certain way, I get a certain circuit with a certain behavior. Each smartphone, TV, auto, computer, etc., around us is testiment to this kind of knowledge. Of course, except for the 1/1000 that is defective.

yup it’s my personal trademark to the bone.
now, mr Michael 2, do you understand that a self contradiction is false?
do you understand that proof and truth are logical constructs and do not apply to fantasy where logic is inapplicable?
do you fancy you can prove that the truth is unprovable? do, please, dive into that fantasy. there’s no bottom to it – it’s mysticism all the way down.
or maybe you think you can prove, by logic, that logic no longer functions to prove truth?
dive deep.
because vid or it didn’t happen, mr mike. that means if you can’t prove it, it’s just neoplatonic excrescence.
i call BS on it. if you can’t speak the truth, wtf good are ya? who needs another mystic?
there’s a better link to the discussion of Principles of Science but you are unworthy.
it’s your pons asinorum and you are welcome to the fear and ignorance you have to live with as a result.
not only that, you’re a little typhoid mary trying to spread your infection. try it at berkeley or stanford or harvard where it’s in demand in the war against the mind. you, mr mike, are a vector for weapons’ grade stupidity- it kills.

sorry, gungadin- i got this comment in the wrong place.
it was a reply to michael2, next thread up.
he was struggling with the distinction between ‘unable’ and ‘impossible’ and making a mess of it.
that simple literacy fail, because it is corruption of a fundamental cognitive principle, affects his entire metaphysics.
he has become unable to conceive of truth/falsehood as a binary alternative.
even though we use arithmetic lookin symbols 1 and 0 to represent it, those symbols are not numbers in any sense. there is no 0.5 true. there is no -0.5 true. there is ‘true’ or ‘not’. that’s all there is in the realm of reality and a mind’s ability to conceive it.
all else belongs to the subjunctive netherworld of that which is not.
popper was a pickled piker.
if something is IMPOSSIBLE to falsify, it is outside the realm of reason
if something is IMPOSSIBLE to prove, it is outside the realm of reason.
anything true can be proven. (that’s what logic is all about)
if it can not be proven it can not be true.
if an experiment is not designed such that it can be evaluated and resolved to this binary alternative, then it has not produced a conclusion. not all experiments are intended to resolve something in this way. some are investigations to discover things. the first step of any cognitive process is: identification.
if a person fails to grasp that identification requires distinction of a set whose boundaries either include or exclude, then you have a muddled mind that straddles the fence between fact and fantasy and has no way to determine which side any proposition is on – it can never resolve truth when truth, itself, the nature of, has not been properly identified. ‘proper’ means ‘without contradiction’ – that’s what logic is all about- non.contradictory identification.

gnomish writes “do you understand that a self contradiction is false?”

I consider it self defining; it is a contradiction, neither true nor false. To continue in a logical algorithm as if it is false can later result in it becoming true through inverse or converse. It is better to bail out completely and not assume that logic can be applied to a contradiction.

“do you understand that proof and truth are logical constructs and do not apply to fantasy where logic is inapplicable?”

These words can be used in several realms. In the realm of fantasy it will mean whatever the writer wishes it to mean.

“do you fancy you can prove that the truth is unprovable? do, please, dive into that fantasy. there’s no bottom to it – it’s mysticism all the way down.”

It depends on the precise meanings you apply to these words, but yes, there is a path to unprovability of truth or proof and that exists because of recursion: The words and concepts necessary to a proof are part of the thing being proved.

“or maybe you think you can prove, by logic, that logic no longer functions to prove truth?
dive deep.”

Logic is a means to proceed from something that is accepted to something that is being argued. Any truth in the deduction is dependent on the truth of the claims or postulates that go into the process as well as correct application of logic. Thomas Aquinas seems to have good logic; we differ on the assumptions and reliability of the constraints.

“because it did or it didn’t happen, mr mike. that means if you can’t prove it, it’s just neoplatonic excrescence.”

Your argument is illogical ;-) Show your work! Things that cannot be proven remain in the realm of claims and assertions, not known to be true or false; like Schroedinger’s Cat.

“i call BS on it.”

By now I have forgotten what “it” is.

“if you can’t speak the truth, wtf good are ya?”

That is also illogical. Good does not derive from speaking the truth. Good is a judgment each person makes for himself not usually following rational processes. As it happens, I always speak truth, but whether you hear truth is quite a different matter.

“who needs another mystic?”

I believe Susan needs another one. Given how many exist I suspect that many need another mystic.

“there’s a better link to the discussion of Principles of Science but you are unworthy.”

That is an illogical statement. This fallacy is called “non-sequitur”. It is unclear how my worthiness relates to your willingness to post a link to a somewhat off-topic discussion of Principles of Science. Many people read this blog; perhaps you have become hyperfocused on me. Where is your logic?

“it’s your pons asinorum and you are welcome to the fear and ignorance you have to live with as a result.”

Thank you. I doubt I need your permission or reassurance but I appreciate the sentiment. I will suggest that the more ignorant a person, the less fear he feels, so these two things tend to be rival rather than directly proportional.

Gnomish, it is you that is constrained by your binary mind. I don’t fault you for it; the phenomenon is extremely common and leads to non-optimum decision making. Most of the real world is not yes or no, 1 or 0. For that reason it became necessary for computer programmers to devise “fuzzy logic”.

[https]://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic “is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth values of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1. By contrast, in Boolean logic, the truth values of variables may only be the integer values 0 or 1. employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely false. Furthermore, when linguistic variables are used, these degrees may be managed by specific (membership) functions. The term fuzzy logic was introduced with the 1965 proposal of fuzzy set theory by Lotfi Zadeh. Fuzzy logic had however been studied since the 1920s, as infinite-valued logic—notably by Łukasiewicz and Tarski. Fuzzy logic has been applied to many fields, from control theory to artificial intelligence.”

But to a practical or pragmatic person, everything exists in degrees and nuances; the gas tank is 3/4 full. Is it full? No. Is it empty? No. Well where does that leave you and your precious binary logic? With a failed argument, that’s where.

Is the Earth a sphere? No! What does that leave? Flat Earth? Let’s hear you say it…

Welcome to the grand fallacy of the false alternatives.

The Earth is nearly spherical. Most things claimed to be true are at best nearly true simply because of the limitations of language. Get comfortable with fuzzy logic because that’s how the Earth turns.

Since essentially all knowledge you possess arrived filtered by your vocabulary and sense, you cannot be sure of anything beyond your own existence, and even that is merely a logical argument (but a good one!)

well, i guess you’re as good an example as can be found, but i’ve dissected them so many times the novelty has completely worn off and the only reward i can find is in the schadenfreude, so no, we won’t be having any conversation about logic, since you’ve abandoned it explicitly-
(” it is a contradiction, neither true nor false”… ” It is better to bail out completely and not assume that logic can be applied to a contradiction.”)
– or that requires reason, for without logic, reason is not possible.

what we can do together is examine monstrosity, if you wish more attention.
i’ve heard of some very weird body mods – nipple removal, castration, belly button removal –
but here we have a chance to examine your fabulous ‘mind mods’.
as you can have no logical point to your discourse- having denied that there can be anything but whimsy anyway- i’ll guess it’s purely a bid to recruit more infected so your misery has company. so do your act. connie hamza you are not, but you can be an fine specimen for students of abnormal psychology.

Yes, but not directly. I cannot probe myself but by observing the actions of other people (you) as they interact with me, calibrated to a baseline of you interacting with others as differenced by my interaction with others, I can see how I alter your behavior and in that manner can detect something of the properties of my mind mods.

so, if you are ready to begin-
the fundamental alternative in the universe is existence or nonexistence.
shakespeare phrased it ‘to be or not to be’
if those 2 states were represented by the symbols T and F, respectively, would you confuse them with numbers?

the purpose of the question is to establish one of the scotomae which is inappropriate transposition of conceptual mapping. (abuse of metaphor)
a simple example to illustrate this concept would be to ask ‘what color is 3?’

Which for any value of “b” is always true (depending perhaps on the CPU implementation).

“if those 2 states were represented by the symbols T and F, respectively, would you confuse them with numbers?”

There would be no confusion and they would be numbers (in a computer; where the only things that exist are numbers, or more precisely, “bits” with number values).

T and F are usually represented by integers, such that partially true cannot exist in a computer. It is considered a weakness when applying computers to real world situations.

“the purpose of the question is to establish one of the scotomae which is inappropriate transposition of conceptual mapping. (abuse of metaphor)”

I like it when people use Big Words ™. It makes me look things up. Whether you are using them correctly is unclear but at least I admire the effort.

“a simple example to illustrate this concept would be to ask ‘what color is 3?’ “

A very dark blue. (try it in HTML bgcolor=”3″)

But I take your meaning. You are trying to salvage your argument, and it’s okay, just not entirely relevant. Argumentatively true is not the same as objectively true is not the same as boolean logic true.

On they other hand, there is the “Gray Fallacy”.
You claim the case is black.
I claim the case is white.

The “observer” tries to be “Fair” and says, well, then it must be Gray.
One, Two or all Three of us may be dead wrong.
Deliberately, in my case (if I am lying), or by mistake (if you made a simple error), or by trying to create a “truth” out of the middle of a black-and-white case (the “observer”). But the case has NOT changed its color.

And the “fact” that the case has not changed its color (or, as Terry Pratchett says “The leopard has not changed its shorts” doesn’t matter. The judge has issued her ruling! The paper is written. The paper can be cited!

Gnomish mentions “noumena” so I study it briefly. [https]://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon

By Kant’s Critique, our minds may attempt to correlate in useful ways, perhaps even closely accurate ways, with the structure and order of the various aspects of the universe, but cannot know these “things-in-themselves” (noumena) directly.

Yes, that is reasonable. When you see something, the “seeing” is taking place in your mind and the actual reality of the thing is uncertain. You might be having a vivid hallucination for instance. Usually the correspondence with the world is reasonably accurate as learned by experience growing up.

What is useful about this line of thinking is exemplified in the search for truth, or claiming to possess it. It is more likely that each person possess a thing that exists only in his mind; his perception of a thing, but not the thing itself.

Another reader discusses that different people can describe the color of an object in different ways; and these descriptions can be synthesized into a new way (the gray fallacy). But the object doesn’t have color per se. Its properties include reflectance at each wavelength of light that impinges upon it. It is a human mind that turns this into “color” and people can declare it variously, might even see it variously.

That particular example can be truthfully said to represent a 29, or a 70, or no numerals at all, depending on the eyes of the observer. Is it a “29”? No, that judgment takes place in a human mind after processing by human senses. if your senses process it differently, which some will, you’ll get a 70; and you will truthfully report it as “70” while others report truthfully that it is a “29” — in fact, it is both and a third option is also true; no numerals at all.

Language that denotes the properties of an object ought to be distinct from language by which you “see” the properties of an object but others might see the same object differently.

I take from this brief review that “noumena” is the word Kant uses to denote the thing itself, impossible to know or prove objectively, but is known through our senses — we see it, touch it; but in all cases passed through the filters of our senses and thus does not and cannot BE the object.

God (or telepathic aliens) can plant directly in your mind knowledge that has not passed through your senses and consequently might be more accurate and corresponding with objective reality than anything else you know. It can also be pure fiction. But whatever it is remains uncolored by your sensory apparatus and becomes the new gauge by which everything else is measured.

try this one if you prefer:
the alphabet is a sequence of symbols.
if one desires ‘post normal validity fluidity’ and assumes there is a letter between A and B, how does he find A * 1.5?
A) computer model
B) divine revelation
C) pal review & consensus
D) need additional funding to study this

gnomish writes: “the alphabet is a sequence of symbols. if one desires post normal validity fluidity and assumes there is a letter between A and B, how does he find A * 1.5?
A) computer model. B) divine revelation. C) pal review & consensus. D) need additional funding to study this.”

I believe any of those approaches would suffice. Probably a combination and definitely need funding to study it. Algebraically it would just stay “A*1.5” rather like we tend to leave “pi” in an equation rather than substituting its value, particularly when it’s going to eventually be canceled out anyway.

“Gnomish, it is you that is constrained by your binary mind.”
oh, mr michael2 – i heard bill nye say this just the other day – did you let him put those words in your mouth?
you say it is insensitive to assume that a fact has a cisboolean identity.
that’s certainly no less cringeworthy.
(should i check my rational privilege?)

as bernie getz said- you look like you could use another.

howbow this one:
when someone tries to use logic to prove that logic can’t prove anything, is it:
A cute as my little pony
B sophisticated nuance unfathomable by mere mortals
C a divine revelation of the ineffable
D the perfect person to raise your children

“Individuals may show splendid qualities, but the influence of mysticism paralyses the intellectual development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mysticism is a relentlessly proselytizing psychopathology.” – not winston churchill

Dejoice! you have achieved Very Impotent Person status.

popper is a mystic. he repackaged plato’s unknowable essence so it could be fed to the gullible and cripple their cognitive abilities. popper is anti-science.
it’s already done a job on you. look at all the absurd assertions you are presenting as if they were true.
with popper as your guru of choice (and only crippled minds seek gurus) how can you claim to know that anything is true?
didn’t popper tell you that the only thing you can prove is that proof is unprovable?
(and didn’t you utterly fail to recognize the self contradiction?)
or did you have some divine revelation? do you have supernatural powers?
don’t look now, but there’s a noumenal essence under your bed – you know it’s there because you can’t prove it.

gnomish writes: (well, you can read it above but here for context establishment) “oh, mr michael2 – i heard bill nye say this just the other day – did you let him put those words in your mouth?”

No.

“you say it is insensitive to assume that a fact has a cisboolean identity.”

I regret not knowing the meaning of cisboolean. Consequently it is unlikely that I said what you say I said.

“should i check my rational privilege?”

There is no “should”. Check or not check as you please.

“when someone tries to use logic to prove that logic can’t prove anything, is it: A cute as my little pony.
…”

A. It’s cute.

“Dejoice! you have achieved Very Impotent Person status.”

Thank you. I enjoy awards even when only one person knows what it means.

“popper is a mystic.”

Likely so. Maybe someday I will meet a person that is not. It will likely be rather boring.

“he repackaged plato’s unknowable essence so it could be fed to the gullible and cripple their cognitive abilities.”

Since I don’t quite get Plato, perhaps I won’t quite get Popper, but I *do* understand some of his arguments. They resemble Bertrand Russel’s arguments; you do not seem to be deprecating Bertrand Russel but perhaps that’s in your next chapter. Russel argues that asserting a thing in a believable way requires to show that alternative possibilities have been explored and found not existing. This is the weakness of climate science, and along ago it was the same weakness for Christianity; it is easy to say God created the Earth, it is difficult to say how exactly it was done. Many have gone to great lengths to explore how indeed might it be done. Bertrand Russel, if I remember the story right, postulates the existence of a teapot in orbit somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. It can neither be proven to exist nor can it be proven to not exist; but this deficiency does not alter its actual existence, or the truth of its actual existence.

So it is that nearly everything in the universe exists that exists, but you do not know that it exists, but that ignorance on your part does not suddenly cause the universe to cease to exist, or to become untrue or false.

“popper is anti-science.”

Maybe. The word “anti” gets used for a great many things, but in this case, to be anti-science would require science to be converted to a “thing” about which one can be “anti”. As it happens I don’t accept that science is a “thing” and therefore I doubt one could be anti-science. One can certainly be against the new religion called Science with its holy writs, preachers, acolytes, disciples and demands for money.

“it’s already done a job on you.”

I’m still hoping to figure out what “it” is.

“look at all the absurd assertions you are presenting as if they were true.”

How could I not? I wrote them!

“how can you claim to know that anything is true?”

I do not know the “how” exactly. It is a lot easier to know the “what”. Descartes provides a way to establish the First Truth, that of one’s own existence. All other truths must flow from that one, because if you don’t know for sure of your own existence, but it is your senses by which you detect everything else, it may be that nothing exists if you do not.

But once you have determined your own existence then you can try to validate your sensory apparatus toward an objective truth rather than a sensory truth. I haven’t quite figured out how to do that with 100 percent assurance.

“didn’t popper tell you that the only thing you can prove is that proof is unprovable?”

Yes, he didn’t. Over the years I have seen some discussions on the meta-question of whether the methods of proof also need proving, and if so, the methods of proving the methods of proving need proving, and so on, recursively, ad infinitum.

“and didn’t you utterly fail to recognize the self contradiction?”

Too many negatives; “didn’t fail” is not the same as succeeding in a trinary world, but in a binary world perhaps this construction makes sense. At any rate, an argument (which is what I believe Popper makes) is not a proof.

“or did you have some divine revelation? do you have supernatural powers?”

Yes to both.

“don’t look now, but there’s a noumenal essence under your bed”

If you say there is, I won’t dispute it. Could be true, might not be, I’ll start with 0.5 true!

but i knew that…lol- you saved me some time. and that concludes this dissection.
my preacher detector has a bent needle…lol
i know it won’t mean much to you, but in case anybody else cares:
bits are not numbers – see Shannon for the details
Magritte quote that’s pertinent:
“Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”
and any monkey can sign – but they can’t put together a rational argument.

You are right Nick. Ideologues believe outsiders to be stupid and they show how stupid they believe them to be by naming their journal ‘Cogent’, like the East Germany use of both ‘Demokratisches’ and ‘Republik’ and predictably also used by other entities. Ditto ‘Peoples’. Protesteth-too-much rubrics are a ‘tell’ obvious to an idjit but not to the juvenile thinkers behind them.

I see changing from the clear terminology ‘global warming’ to P-too-much ‘climate change’ in the same light. All suggest that the certainly of the idea is dialed back (in the GDR of course they didn’t go through step 1). I’m sure, that although you offer scientific support for the idea of CO2 warming, you have walked back a bit on the imminent danger view.

… Ideologues believe outsiders to be stupid and they show how stupid they believe them to be by naming their journal ‘Cogent’,

Cogent Open Access Journals is a division of Taylor and Francis. link I don’t think the name of the journal has anything to do with the ideologues associated with that particular journal.

Taylor and Francis has developed a business model for its Cogent OA division which a blogger described thus:

So get this: If your article gets rejected from one of our regular journals, we’ll automatically forward it to one of our crappy interdisciplinary pay-to-play journals, where we’ll gladly take your (or your funder’s or institution’s) money to publish it after a cursory “peer review”. link

I have a hunch that the “peer review” part is as big a hoax as the penis paper. There’s a big market for people desperate to publish lest they perish. The trouble with Cogent OA journals is that they don’t have a real good impact factor. If you’re trying for a tenure track position, I suspect that publication in a Cogent OA journal won’t do you much good.

Careful, I’ve heard on good authority
that “Dick and Jane” has been censored because it is not nclusive of other genders and ethnicities, and includes a hyper masculine violator and outsider not recognized as part of diversity.

Brilliant hoax but hoaxes of this kind have happened before in other fields and would you believe have been taken seriously and even defended !

In the 1940’s in Australia two bored service men in barracks with time on their hands pieced together a series of modern stream of consciousness “poems” culled from excerpts from a wide range of unrelated texts- including one on control of mosquitoes. They claimed them to have been written by a deceased car mechanic named Ern Malley- whom they portrayed as a “naive” unsung working class poet.

The “poems ” were submitted to the Journal Angry Penguins which specialized in avant garde “literature” It duly published them.
When the hoax was uncovered academics and other lovers of the incomprehensible defended their publication on the grounds that somehow or other unconsciously the perpetrators had produced good art despite themselves !

So don’t be surprised if some green feminist types find genuine merit in the “Conceptual penis” and its purported link to climate change gobbledegook

Fossil-fuel based technology is certainly a hypermasculinization of culture, with its phallic smoke stacks ejaculating into the skies of mother earth, clearly making carbon-based technology a mother f***er.

This is the new buzzword of feminists and postmodernists: “penis-induced climate change”
It won’t take long some will decry sexual discrimination! and introduce the term “vagina-induced climate change”

“I have got to admit, I’m so used to wading through peer reviewed climate garbage, I would likely have accepted this study at face value. The hoax paper simply doesn’t stand out that much from other nonsensical peer reviewed rubbish”

Too much! Had a hernia laughing so hard it hurt. It almost all sounded incredibly credible and as you say, if not forewarned in advance, I would have shook my head and said, “boy, is this sh-it over my head”. And I would have been right.

Global Warming Is Now A ‘Women ’s Issue’ Due To ‘Ecofeminism
Environmentalists are increasingly claiming that global warming is a “women’s issue” and that the world needs “eco-feminism” as a path forward.
snip
Ecofeminists believe that women and nature are bonded by traditionally “feminine” values and their shared history of oppression by a patriarchal Western society. This patriarchal society is built on four intersectional pillars of sexism, racism, class exploitation, and environmental destruction.http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/global-warming-is-now-a-womens-issue-due-to-ecofeminism/

They dug a tunnel into a mountain, down hill, in supposed permafrost, and didn’t think that water might flow down hill in a summer melt season in that tunnel? Oh, they did put pumps in it too…. but that is not news.

No seeds were harmed during this comment. Just sayin, how do you spell stupid?

Two upstanding citizens create a literary phallusy called “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct”, arguing with turgid prose that members of the X-Y gender ‘rape the empty space around them’ while ‘despoiling virgin environments’, thus causing Anthropogenic Global Warming!

Even better, the ‘scientific’ journal Cogent Social Sciences peer reviews it, gives it high praise, and publishes their literary erection!

I’m guessing the University of Huddersfield, UK aren’t exactly proud of Dr Jamie Halsall and I’m pretty sure his students won’t let this one go, especially as Halsall has had a long and fruitful relationship with Wankhade:

well, in defence of real science: we can’t do much about fake journals publishing bullshit. It’s a pretty well known scam. They charge you a couple of hundred dollars and you get to pad your CV with some fake papers. C’est la vie. If you’re in the field you know immediately what journals to ignore.

@BenBen
More importantly, they know which journals will publish their garbage! And now we have an entire and entrenched false paradigm that is in the process of destroying Western science and civilization!

Perhaps you mistook WUWT as a science journal rather than what it is, commentary on popular issues occasionally revolving around and sometimes delving into the science of climate and weather. I love Willis E’s stories about sailing where the impact of weather and climate is felt in the sails of his boat. There’s nothing scientific about it; 100 percent USDA Pure Anecdote, but with pictures.

If you want science journalism, well, I don’t know where to find such a thing. SciAm abandoned it long ago and it seems National Geographic has joined it in the march to the left, with its June cover page being “Why We Lie”, a remarkable admission. Science News is still pretty good; they seem to squeeze in some science here and there.

At some point in my career I discovered that it is much harder to seem brilliant when writing short, simple, active sentences. To make the point to my team (and because I loved self violating orders) I wrote across the top of my whiteboard, “Eschew Pedantic Obfuscation”

Imagine the dismay in the academic publication world if that rule were followed.

When news , science , engineering, is not explained in everyday terms it is BS ,when the other stuff they call the soft sciences is written about no matter what terms are used it is usually BS. This is the way it is ,as it is a flim flam thing, totally unnecessary and totally useless and funded by idiots in high places with our taxes.

Modern Educayshun
With the spectacular and deadly failure of Economic Marxism, a re-branding was necessary for the devout.
Marxism’s second act would be the task of ripping apart Western civilization piece-by-piece by using the age-old strategy of divide-and-conquer.
Cultural Marxism would be the new angle of attack.
The crack-up that we’re witnessing in American universities, and in portions of our culture is not an accident.
It’s deliberate.
Welcome to Modern Educayshun:http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/modern-educayshun

Brent , be prepared for worsehttp://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/05/18/university-of-hawaii-professor-universities-should-stop-hiring-white-cis-men/
-“A professor at the public University of Hawaii argues that the university should stop hiring “white cis men.”
Piper Harron, an assistant professor of mathematics at the public University of Hawaii, is demanding that “white cis men” resign from their faculty positions, claiming that “actual solutions require women of color and trans people.”
Harron lays out her argument for ridding academia of white men in a blog post for The American Mathematical Society. In the post, Harron asks “white cis” men to resign from their positions and employers to stop hiring white men in order to make room for black women and trans individuals.”-

Unless of course you are fortunate enough to fall into the category favoured by Prof Harron.

At least this peer accepted study, hoax or no hoax, clearly proves and clearly demonstrates that, if enough time given to monkeys, there will be one or two that actually can write a Moby-Dick, with a capital letter “D”

Cogent OA, the publisher of the article, is part of the Taylor & Francis Group. The publisher is a member in good standing of the global academic community. Articles from this specific journal are even linked from the website of the International Olympic Committee.

Note that they intentionally included contradictory statements and nonsense verbiage. This shows that logic has been abandoned by post-modernists who often call it “oppressive”–and yet without logic nothing in our modern world is possible. The call for a “feminist science” also strike me as bizarre. Many journals you can submit your paper with just your first initials and the reviewers don’t even know if you are male or female. Your race, sex, nationality does not matter much if at all in doing science, though of course there might be discrimination (against men actually) in the hiring process. Why so few women in science? Because they aren’t interested–note that in medicine, where women are interested, they do quite well.

An excerpt from the paper (“When ‘Angelino’ squirrels don’t eat nuts: a feminist posthumanist politics of consumption across southern California”) beggars the imagination. Look a squirrel:

“Although none of the popular news articles analyzed here invoked explicitly gendered phrases or terms (as in ‘female’), implicit gendered narratives and more overt racialized and speciesist narratives connected to eastern fox squirrel food choices were constructed in popular news articles and intimated ‘food as body’ or that food choices, interpreted through gendered, racialized, and speciesist lenses, make animal and human identities (Cooks 2009 Cooks, L. 2009. “You Are What You (Don’t) Eat? Food, Identity, and Resistance.” Text and Performance Quarterly 29 (1): 94–110.10.1080/10462930802514388[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 101). Eastern fox squirrels are more obviously otherized through these narratives, but a feminist perspective also sheds light on how these narratives work to define and reify other categories of difference, which have important implications for feminist theory’s understandings of the human experience, more broadly.”

Deconstructively differentiating backside from elbow has led to an integration of the foot with mouth dialectic. Consequently assuring some of the people some of the time can be juxtaposed with idiots.

Historically, the mentally ill were shunned, often forced to live in isolation from society and treated quite harshly. This was not compassionate. On the other hand, putting them in charge of schools and science journals would seem an unwarranted overreaction, and unwise.

Apparently, and if anyone remembers, this is not the first time a hoax of this nature has happened. It was also done by a physicist by name of Alan Sokal back in 1996. The junk paper was published in a publication called “Social Text”……….

‘……Back in 1996, Sokal’s parody began by charging that physicists in particular “cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook.” This imposed dogma, the satirist wrote, holds “that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of” humans and humankind. He emphasized his feigned arguments with disdain-conveying quotation marks to stigmatize key terms: the properties, he explained, are seen “encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws” about which humans “can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge … by hewing to the ‘objective’ procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method……”.’

To paraphrase here from drug and alcohol rehab centers, if it is to cure itself, the first step for science is to admit that it has a problem…..

My guess is, that “the emperor’s new clothes” analogy most significantly applies to the GHE theory itself. I mean, what if (hemispheric) emissivity of water was like 0.84, while absorptivity was much higher, like 0.94, and water would naturally yield like 287K? And what if furthermore clouds play much larger role on climate as the IPCC wants to make us believe? And what if all these questions have already been answered? Clicking my name might reveal something important ;)

Well, you guys missed the whole point.
1 – You can get a peer-reviewed paper published as long as you can fill it with politically correct subject matter references and engage in a prolonged and overabundant use of polysyllabic nouns, adjectives and adverbs.
2 – You can probably get a grant for research on some subject such as sitting on the couch and doing nothing, using the same methodology. Just connect yourself to an educational institution like a county or state college by taking a class and get your instructor to approve it, or do what Annie Sprinkle did.

Gosh, so many comments here and not a single one has spotted what is the problem with this whole story. THE JOURNAL.

This is no reputable journal. It is unranked in the impact index. It is essentially a pay-per-publish journal that says that it does peer review when it doesn’t. Publishing in that journal proves NOTHING except that you can pay to have your garbage published.

The Journal page is rife with signs that this is not a reputable journal:“Pay what you can”
“Authors love us”https://www.cogentoa.com/journal/social-sciences
This is just a business outlet that exploits the need of researchers to have publications even if the research they produce is rejected by reputable journals.

Apparently, before publishing their hoax here, the authors sent it to a third rate journal, NORMA: The International Journal for Masculinity Studies, that summarily rejected it.

I’m afraid the authors of the hoax have proved nothing. But hey! This is WUWT. A lot of people here are jumping to conclusions about science and peer review that surely they could publish somewhere if they are willing to pay for it.

Brad Keyes wrote a zinger based on actual quotes from a climate profit…eeerrr prophet and not only got ATTP to nimble around whining that since the satire was not published in Time it must be “fake news”, but got the profiting professor to show up and show his tail. These academic apparatchiks are all rent seeking and zip on actual science.

And how do you know it was actually peer-reviewed?
Do you trust an unknown open-access journal, with a business model based on charging the authors, that can only charge on accepted articles, that does not print copies, on doing a proper peer-review against their own financial interest?

The problem here is not with Academy, but with the exploitation of the academics need to publish by unscrupulous scam-like businesses. You only need a web page and a fake peer-review that since it is anonymous can be done by your unemployed brother-in-law. The more you publish the better. Hey, some article might even get a citation.

Obviously as your scientific level is non-existent, you can even think that “This paper is not very different from others in this stage of the Academy.” No respectable journal would publish that, so they found a non-respectable journal willing to publish it for a price (they paid above $600 to have it published… on internet). Big deal.

Sorry hunter, you have no idea what you talk about. What this hoax does is to reveal something that everybody in science knows these days. You can get anything published in something that “looks” like a journal, but if you want to actually have a career, you better not publish in that type of journals. The worst of them are called “predatory journals,” as they prey on desperate academics.

Should have been rejected simply because they use the term “transgender” when they mean “transsexual”. In spite of rampant abuse to the contrary, gender and sex are not the same thing. Sex is your physical makeup. Gender is your behavior. You can sexually be male, but act feminine, and vice versa. But acting feminine doesn’t make you female.

The article was a great read with plenty of laughs but when I came to the end the WordPress adverts were for “Mature UK Dating” and “Meet Filipino Women” (c/w Pics). My penis took it as a personal conceptual insult !